A sense of style

I have tried to write regular reviews of the books I read from time to time - or even just lists of what I'm reading - but it never works. It feels like drudgery, and I always abandon it after a while. Also, reading a book, or sometimes two, a day meant that I would have to be constantly updating. As I mentioned before, I'm taking an accidental break from reading.

I did want to upload a list of books that I have found particularly inspiring, though, in terms of their writing style. I feel an affinity with writers whose style is lyrical, vivid and quite spare ... I admire Tolkien's decision to use strong, Anglo-Saxon words that have more punch than the more flowery French ones that came into the language with the Norman invasion.

Anyway, here they are (the ones I can think of at this moment, anyway):

The Bone People - Keri Hulme
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler

If I think of any more, I'll add them ... the sun has cooked my brain somewhat today.

Oh, and worth mentioning for fantastic first-person narration:

Tamsin - Peter S. Beagle
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Mukiwa - Peter Godwin

And as you can see, the word count has climbed to 61,000! Hurrah.

I have just been looking at the information in my right-hand sidebar. It's a little misleading. I have published one novel, yes, and I am working on a new one, but in-between those two points there are all kinds of finished and half-finished projects. There's the sequel to the published book, and the half-finished third one (it was intended to be a trilogy, though each book stands alone), which will never get published now as: a) publishing books in Zim, where the first one came out, is no longer viable; and b) I wrote the sequels when I was sixteen, and if I read them now I would probably cringe and bury them in the garden. Since then I have also written two young adult fantasy novels: The Story Spinners (which I always mean to go back and revise); and Destiny, which I sent off to a few publishers a couple of years ago. Destiny generated some interest, and Macmillan was vacillating a bit, but nothing came of it. I'm glad now, because I really want the current book to be the first one I publish here.

There is also a half-finished one about an exchange student coming to live with a New Zealand family which is languishing in a drawer ... and one that I really want to pursue when this one is well and truly done, which I won't expand on because of my superstition that that would jinx it somehow.

(I won't go too deeply into the hideously embarrassing historical romance I wrote when I was fourteen ... that one will never see the light of day. Oh, and the fantasy novel I wrote when I was eleven. Actually, the one I wrote when I was six might be worth printing. I think it was about ten pages long and boasted the gripping plot of me finding a unicorn in the garden. One of the characters was a fairy called Angel. Or possibly an angel called Fairy. I forget.)