Just another writer
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Writerly resolutions: August status
Chapter 26 is finally done, I’ve completed the first draft of Chapter 27 and I’m partway through the rewrite draft. The story continues to reveal heretofore unknown things about the characters, which is a plus (and some inconsequential happenings in the first draft have become a bit more consequential in the rewrite). I feel optimistic that…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 973 ZIN A people’s history of the United States
For the last two decades, I’ve heard many people waxing rhapsodic about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so when I got to the 970s—History of North America—I decided that this was my chance to finally read it. What I found was not the life-changing book that many people consider it to be.…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 960.3 WES Divide and rule: the partition of Africa, 1880–1914
The 960s bring me to Africa. Another part of the world that I know very little of the history of. The selection of options was somewhat uninspiring, and I decided to take a look at this book. I knew very little about colonialism in Africa. I was most familiar with the history of colonialism in…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 954 DAN A brief history of India
At some point in the late ’90s I decided that I wanted to read a history of India. I think it might have been a result of reading the themed issue of Granta on the country. Whatever my motivation, it never went beyond putting “some history of India” on the long list of books that I…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 940.5318 LEB Memories, miracles & meaning: insights of a Holocaust survivor
The 940s are the history of Europe and I decided to pick up something that might be useful for the novel. One of the things that I’ve learned in the course of researching the novel is that women’s accounts of the Holocaust have been largely marginalized. There is an explicitly stated claim that to treat…
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Writerly resolutions: July status
I finally finished the rewrite of Chapter 26 this month. I have two books covering the events that this chapter hangs on with numerous dog-eared pages indicating useful information that I need to go through and make sure that everything in the book is historically correct or includes some useful details to enrich the narrative, so…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 933 JOS Flavius Josephus: selections from his works
The 930s are the history of the ancient world (not surprisingly, ith the majority of the numbers reserved for the ancient world that was under the rule of the Greeks and Romans). Looking over the options, I spotted this collection of the works of Josephus. Josephus is best-known as being one of the earliest non-Biblical attestations…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 920.72 DIN Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women
The 920s are biography. My library, like any others, shelves most biographies separately, alphabetically by author (this is one of the things that I like about the Library of Congress system—there, literature, for example, is shelved by country/language and grouped by era and biographies and critical work are shelved alongside the authors’ work. Similarly, biographies of…
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“The Norton Anthology of Self-Destructive Behavior”: The story behind the story
This story was one that unfolded itself gradually over time. It started with the title which came to me one day during a residency for my MFA. I wrote down the title and even got so far as writing down a list of self-destructive behaviors, but put it aside for a while after that. I picked…