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Tag: Neil Gaiman

August 2025 Books and Reading Notes

2025-09-012025-09-01 John Winkelman

August was an insanely busy month for me, but did offer up occasional reading time, mostly in airplanes, and at airports, and sitting in the public areas of convention centers before anybody else was awake.

Acquisitions

  1. Kaja and Phil Foglio, An Entertainment in Londinium (Airship Entertainment) [2025.08.05] – Kickstarter reward
  2. Eugene Vodolazkin, The History of the Island (Plough Publishing) [2025.08.14] – Purchased at Snowbound Books in Marquette, Michigan
  3. Juan Felipe Herrera, Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights Books) [2025.08.14] – Purchased at Snowbound Books in Marquette, MI
  4. Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Colleen Doran (artist), Good Omens: The Official (and Ineffable) Graphic Novel (Dunmanifestin, Ltd.) [2025.08.25] – Reward for a Kickstarter which persevered through multiple rounds of slings and arrows over the past couple of years.
  5. Zig Zag Claybourne, Amnandi Sails (Obsidian Sky Books) [2025.08.29]

Reading

Books

  1. Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine [2025.08.17]
  2. Dennis E. Taylor, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (re-read) [2025.08.24]
  3. Dennis E. Taylor, For We Are Many (re-read) [2025.08.25]
  4. Dennis E. Taylor, All These Worlds (re-read) [2025.08.26]

Short Prose

  1. Kameron Hurley, “The Wonder” [2025.08.28]
Posted in Book ListTagged Airship Entertainment, Colleen Doran, Dan Davies, Dennis E. Taylor, Eugene Vodolazkin, Juan Felipe Herrera, Kaja Foglio, Neil Gaiman, Phil Foglio, Terry Pratchett, ZIg Zag Claybourne comment on August 2025 Books and Reading Notes

IWSG, March 2023: I Wish I’d Written That

2023-03-012023-02-28 John Winkelman

The past month was kind of hectic due to a new project at work coinciding with my girlfriend and I, after three years, finally contracting COVID. It wasn’t serious for either of us, thanks to both of us being fully vaccinated and boosted, but it was a boring two and a half weeks of being stuck in the house waiting for the home and PCR tests to come up negative.

Fortunately, we had the cats to keep us entertained.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2023 is: Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?

Well, I mean, YES!!!!!!! All the time. Almost every book I read has a turn of phrase, a scene, a twist, or something like that, which makes me say, “Well, dang! I wish I wrote that.”

The first one that comes to mind is a scene from Neil Gaiman‘s most excellent American Gods. One of the characters, let’s call him “MS,” is killed, and a few of the other characters hold a sort of wake for him, trading stories back and forth. After a little while MS is there, laughing along with the other characters and adding his own comments to the stories. It is handled so subtly that I had to go back and check that I was reading what I thought I was reading. The scene was so well written that there was no sense of disconnect, just a realization that “Well of course MS is going to show up at his own wake. That’s the kind of person [sic] he is!”

This description does scant justice to the scene.

Another is Mary Oliver‘s poem “The Poet Goes to Indiana” from her collection Why I Wake Early. In particular, this section:

…and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being-a neighbor was keeping her there—
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was…

Remarkable! In the fifth line, “soft as velvet” would have worked, but it would have been mundane. Ordinary. There are a million things as soft as velvet. But soft as violets? That is something unique, and enduring.

I could go on and on. Almost everything I read has at least one sentence which is noteworthy (and hopefully more than one, but not always). The moments of awe and revelation are infrequent, and valuable in their rarity.

(Also rare, fortunately, are the lines, plot twists, and scenes which make me think, “Thank the heavens I didn’t write that.” Uncommon but not unknown.)

I will repeat one of my guiding principles, as related by author Karen Lord: “Read well.” Reading well is as much a skill as writing well.

 

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

 

Posted in Literary MattersTagged IWSG, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, reading comment on IWSG, March 2023: I Wish I’d Written That

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