Blog

First I have a few (other) thoughts I’d like to share. What am I doing here with this blog? I’m enjoying writing it very much and hope it’s of interest to others. But what’s it about? What’s the point?

My project is to write about novels from a writer’s perspective. I’m interested in a novel’s structure, how the story is told—the narrator’s role. I‘m interested in characters—how they’re developed, how they drive the story along. And I’m interested in the style of the book, the almost hidden signs that make a book like “Starting Out in the Evening” different from, say, “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

I’m selecting novels that I’ve read at least once before, and I read them again while I’m writing the blog. The posts are a leaky sieve of spoilers—so beware. Although I love books like “Anna Karenina” and “Far From the Madding Crowd,” I won’t be writing about them because so much has already been done. I will write about books that I love, and my purpose is not to be negative. I would not be comfortable writing about a book I didn’t like and criticizing it—for me—a waste of time.