writing and reading

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My writing education – http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/my-writing-education-a-timeline?src=longreads.  An inspiring article – on role models, good teachers, goodness in people, hope and persistence. Coming across a role model like this, who is infallible, a perfect human being – that is so rare.

Last week I happened to connect briefly with a blogger whom I was reading for more than 10 years – I was introduced to many interesting books based on his recommendations. One of which is still a hard nut to crack for me (A Thousand Plateaus – Deleuze and Guattari), but it is one of his lifetime favorites. For me it is like drinking green tea for the first time. So I asked him how he came to like it – he said parts of that book hit him like a train. I was fascinated by that – to be moved that much by a book. When I read some parts of this article, it reminded me of that phrase.

What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms.

 Literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form.

 A story’s positive virtues are not different from the positive virtues of its writer. A story should be honest, direct, loving, restrained. It can, by being worked and reworked, come to have more power than its length should allow. A story can be a compressed bundle of energy, and, in fact, the more it is thoughtfully compressed, the more power it will have.

 Knowing him has helped us grow into better versions of ourselves: more dignified, less selfish. This, of course, is what a ‘role model’ is: someone who, by gracefully embodying positive virtues, causes you to aspire to them yourself.

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I came across the above through http://longreads.com/. When the reading has reduced to sound bites in social media or short articles in newspapers which offer quick dump, long form articles exploring a subject or profile of a person is refreshing. Longreads features most read long form articles around the web every week and many times I come across some gems from there. Another of similar one is #7 Deadly Reads – Sitdown Sunday http://www.thejournal.ie/7-deadly-reads/news/. New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stones, NYT etc end up being the most featured. The Hindu in India does long form, but many of them are so scholarly that it is hard to digest. Not sure if there are any other good ones in India. ​