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This book had its origin in a TED talk where the author presented her insights on mind patterns writers get into. The identification of patterns that aspiring authors commonly hear or get into on their own is useful and clear. Some of the examples she gives to illustrate the points are jokey and silly but the idea is to make them stick in mind better. this book came out over ten years ago and I had already heard a lot of the points it made before back when I was more actively writing fiction, but there were others that hit me in a new way. A lot of the issues brought up aren't currently at the front of my mind right now so they were welcome. There is an emphasis throughout on what works emotionally in a story rather than what gets included as part of rote practice, which I appreciated. I think that this one thing is the main way the book has something to offer among all the other books on writing practice. The asides on brain science are sort of interesting but I think not really essential takeaways. The book isn't aimed at the writer who has a good deal of experience and already has ways to avoid the common pitfalls or at people producing other kinds of work such as non-fiction or experimental literary fiction. It also does not give the reader lists of ways to apply the principles described directly in their current project. But for what it tries to do I thiink it does a good job.

This book came out not long after Conversations with Friends but it seemed to have a quite different structure, concentrating on the two main characters, Marianne and Connell. At the beginning they are in their secondary school days and first come together, they leave their small town to go to Dublin to attend the same college where they drift apart a few times, achieve their successes, get into trouble, and by the end come to a new understanding of their situation. Like the earlier book and the book Beautiful World, Where Are You? a few years later, this book wove in ideas about economics and politics to make one think about how these affected the ways the characters behave. But I think it was more psychological considerations such as childhood trauma, depression, and a will to self-harm that played even greater roles in shaping them. The other characters appearing, the families of the two and their various circles of friends and lovers, all receive lesser degrees of characterization, much of it through dialogue. In some ways the book felt like a less ambitious bit of storytelling than the other two with fewer important things to be keeping track of. The author is still interested in how one gets to know a person, whether it's someone else or one's own self, and digs in to the frustration caused by getting the wrong idea of a person's nature, which is easy to believe here with young people just entering adulthood. There is an imbalance of wealth between Marianne and the working-class Connell similar to what Beautiful World, Where Are You? depicted between Alice and Felix, but those were older characters already out in the world making the issue seem even more substantial. The author is also big on depicting awkwardness her characters feel in general, and I think money and its lack is just one of various ways to achieve that effect in this book.

By the end, one of the main characters is about to launch on a literary career. The talent and work it took to get this far was touched on over the course of the story in a rather understated way, I thought, so I was a little surprised when this is what it led to. I was expecting there were going to be more setbacks and more effort to get to this, and wondered whether it was a conscious choice the author made to keep that from becoming a big focus separate from the relationship plotline. This made me think of the book as being closer to romance than a story about how these two start to approach success in life. The second character has been having unresolved ideas of what to pursue in life which aren't resolved by the end. All of this makes me think that I should rate it one step below what I gave to Conversations with Friends, but not because of the quality of the prose. I know that other readers have expressed some disappointment with this book in comparison to the other, but this isn't my feeling. I consumed this as an ebook, not in audiobook form as in the case of the other two novels, and I wouldn't be surprised if that affected the way that it hit me.

This little book takes the form of very short sections a page or two long describing either the frame story of a meeting between Kublai Khan and explorer Marco Polo who describes his travels through Central asia, or the fanciful cities he claims to have found there. These are titled with enigmatic tags such as "Cities and memory," "Cities and signs," "Thin cities," "Continuous cities" and the like. Each place is dominated by a single dream-like feature governing its citizens. Some come off as fantasy, others so dark as to constitute horror, while still others concern themselves with some odd philosophical point. There is no plot, not even in the frame story sections, no single theme, and the two named characters are given only the slightest of personal qualities. I would say that this is less a novel or series of short stories than a literary construction with fabulistic features. I feel as though the author's intent is to dazzle the reader with the extreme variety of minimalist settings that might have something to say when taken all together about the breadth of human imagination. I never felt that I wanted any of the little sections to be expanded into a proper story itself. Instead, this book presents itself as a travel guide to a nonexistent region that streams by the reader with the speed of someone clicking on a remote. The only way these cities resemble our own is the way they contain people of types we recognize, preying on one another, suffering, wrapped in delusions, working and desiring and trying to make sense of their baffling circumstances they are to weak and confused to escape.

I received this biography of a living person as an Advanced Reader's Copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

The author is a science communicator working primarily in television, but with some non-fiction books to his credit. He reports spending six years working on this biography based on his interviews with the subject and written and verbal communications from those who knew in the course of his life. It is interesting to see how Roger Penrose was raised by parents who had unusual emotional relations which happened to coincide with a kind of mental gift at an early age. He came across his love of geometry and a talent for visualization that stayed with him as his greatest strength over his career. There were also rivalries among his siblings and schoolmates that spurred him to apply himself to abstract thought in ways he might not have pursued all on his own. When his father happened to take an interest in his son's passion for geometry it left an impression on the boy. He learned about physics through popularizations but only came to follow it instead of medicine in an almost offhand way because of rules at the schools he attended.

The middle of this book covers Penrose's rise in theroretical interest using his geometrical insights which were unconventional among his peers. He also married an American he met, Joan, despite their deep differences in personality and career interest. When she experienced a series of depressions he was personally unequipped to help, immersed in his own life of the mind. At one point he remembered with a friend of his younger sister's, Judith, and transferred his emotional investment to her as a muse. Though the relationship was not primarily sexual as he thought of it, the secrecy and obsessive aspects led him away from this marriage with three young children when he left to take a job at Oxford and live on his own. This enabled him to spend time with Judith who helped him put together his books. He would repeat this pattern three more times after the two of them broke off their relationship, each time with much younger unattached women. One of them termed this a "Gaugin complex" in which a talented creative man feels he can only produce his work only through the companionship of a young woman. He married one of these companions for three decades, but tried to return to it afterwards. I was troubled by the psychology that led to this, which never seems to have been resolved or completely understood by Penrose. In the end, he also alienated many professional physicists by devising interpretations of physics that went far beyond the mainstream. He was the only one on his level talking about cyclic cosmology and how microtubules underlie consciousness. This pattern towards conflict was as though he could not control what the emotional poverty of his upbringing caused him to do. By the end of the book we see Penrose as a solitary, infirm man in his 90s clinging to a hope that some of these later preoccupations would outlive him. It is an odd trajectory for a life that seemed as though it had been destined to achieve so much distinction in mathematical physics, with numerous medals besides the Nobel Prize, but went down a fringe path no one else wanted to follow. This is what makes his story one of the "impossible" man of the title.

This book had been on my To Be Read list for many years waiting for me to devote some time to the artistic mindset. It pits artistic creativity against the demands of the capitalist market and looks at what accommodations art needs to continue being lively. In past societies organized around gift exchange as a marker of prestige, those who produced art were often seen as channeling a gift to the entire community, not judged by how much price they could command. The gift economy connected people and affirmed relationships. The book takes an in depth look at the thoughts of two American poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, to see how they fared in the 19th and 20th centuries as our present day economy was being set in place. What is pretty clear is how neither one really did well by market standards, even while they were lauded by peers. Art still semes to come from a different place that doesn't translate into a living unless one can take advantage of patronage and sponsorships explicitly outside of the market for creative work. I did not know about Pound's ideas for an alternative system of money which decays as it goes unused, one which never had a chance at adoption.

In the end, the book returns to the idea that some gift relationship which fosters creativity can in some way coexist with the market economy. It would have been interesting to know what the author would think of crowdsourcing and patronage using the internet as a medium as ways to support art outside of the market.

An artist who does not need to live off of their art can create art today. I count myself among these in this stage of my life. I am still concerned for fellow creatives who do need to come up with a living in a heavily capitalistic economy, who likely have to find alternative funding as these dwindle.

This anthology dates back to 1979. It is a shared-world fantasy, one of the first, set in the city of Sanctuary where swordplay and sorcery are not unknown. this first book in the series has stories written by eight prominent fantasy writers with overlapping settings and characters, though quite different styles. There was no attempt to construct a single narrative arc from these, so it reads as an anthology of related short stories. The conflict is interpersonal, not human vs. nature or human vs. monster.

Like many tales from the 1970s, there are alements that take a modern reader aback because of changes in societal norms. There is a lot of violence, but not as much as a person raised on rough videogames might expect. There are allusions to gender roles which were acceptable then that many might find offensive or demeaning now. In particular the last story in the book aged poorly because of the objectification of underage female characters and by the posthumous revelations concerning child abuse on the part of its author, Marion Zimmer Bradley. That one really put me off, but there were glimpses of similar treatment in a couple of the others too. Still the grittiness probably wouldn't come as a total surprise to any reader coming this collection simply because of the title and introduction. This is no high fantasy romance, pretty obviously. the writing was generally rather well executed by professionals, constrained necessarily by word-length limitations.

There are another elven books in the series. I don't think I will be soon tackling any others. I think they might be interesting to a reader interested in the fantasy noir genre's origins or nostalgic for the time before, when conventions were established.